New Delhi
It does not matter what education an institution claims to impart to its students if it has failed to teach the value of even one human life to its pupil, say experts, alumni, professors after shocking details have emerged of culture of ragging prevalent at Jadavpur University, where it is still considered a “rite of passage”.
Rajat Ray, Dean of students at JU, accepts it is a “total failure of the university” as he regrets a young life lost under horrifying condition after a first-year undergraduate lost his life by plunging to his death from the second floor of the main hostel building just two days after moving in on 7 August after being mentally and physically traumatised by his seniors.
“Unlike in the IITs, JU has never imposed campus discipline on students that can be termed ‘strict’, or have even tried reining in the perpetrators in an exemplary manner when gross violations were found,” Ray told The Sunday Guardian.
Students have been suspended or even rusticated from time to time, but that has never gone up to the extent of forming or implementing strict norms in the campus, said a professor from Arts department without wanting to be named. “There is lawlessness inside the campus and there’s little the administration or the professors can do to stop it,” he told The Sunday Guardian, adding that punitive action has had a “culture of backfiring on us”.
Officials find implementing policy measures burdensome inside the JU, where students’ organisation hold full sway with senior students calling shots at many levels. “These current seniors are mouthpieces of passed out former students who actually call the shots,” the professor added.
“Take the case of hostel accommodation, as it is there are too few rooms and numbers will even deplete given the fourth year added to undergraduate courses,” the professor said. Talking about the key accused in the ragging death, Sourav Choudhury, who is a past JU student, as to what led to the unauthorised occupancy of hostel seats by those like Chowdhury, who is now in police custody, he said: “In reality, it’s the students who have the final say on who gets accommodation. There’s little that others, teachers and administration officials, can do here. Despite a point-system and only two student voices in the nine-member authority, how has the entire say been usurped by students?”
The irregularities were already brought to the notice of former vice chancellor Prof Suranjan Das and registrar Pradip Kr. Ghosh. “Committees were formed but then nothing further happened,” said Ray, pointing at many rifts among different strata of the JU administration.
SUGAR cosmetics COO and co-founder Kaushik Mukherjee, who is a pass out of Don Bosco Calcutta, and an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus, said although there is a “strong urge to continue tradition”, those from the current generation must realise that they have been called “change makers”, who grew up with a plethora of opinions and options to make a career–from engineer to influencer. He said: “Make the change now, be the batch that was ragged, but never ragged the next.”
JU, which was ranked among the top 10 universities in India in 2022, and top 25 in Asia, has been witness to many ragging and bullying cases throughout the first two decades of the new millennium (not including those before 2000), which have often crossed the threshold of an innocent introduction and included physical torture, said an alumnus of Calcutta University, who wished to remain anonymous as his wife is a junior lawyer fighting a few of these cases. Interestingly, most might end up in out-of-court settlements, he said.